Sanskrit
अश्रद्दधानाः पुरुषा धर्मस्यास्य परन्तप । अप्राप्य मां निवर्तन्ते मृत्युसंसारवर्त्मनि ॥
aśraddadhānāḥ puruṣā dharmasyāsya parantapa aprāpya māṃ nivartante mṛtyusaṃsāravartmani
Translation
Men without faith in this knowledge, O Parantapa, not reaching Me, return to the paths of this world of death.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
The warning is structural, not incidental: faith is named as the gate to a teaching that otherwise stays inert, a claim the Gita restates directly much later (17.3) and implicitly through this chapter’s own contrast between devoted and half-hearted worship at verses 22-23. “Return to the paths of this world of death” (mṛtyu-saṃsāra-vartmani) states the stakes as saṃsāra versus liberation — the same opposition verse 1 already set up with “freed from evil.” Without śraddhā the rāja-vidyā simply does not land — aprāpya mām, “not reaching Me” — and the person stays on the mṛtyu-saṃsāra track. Chapter 17 makes faith itself the whole subject.
Study deeper
Word by word
- aśraddadhānāḥ puruṣāअश्रद्दधानाः पुरुषा
- men without faith (aśraddadhānāḥ + puruṣāḥ)
- dharmasyāsya parantapaधर्मस्यास्य परन्तप
- in this teaching, O scorcher of the foe (dharmasya + asya + parantapa)
- aprāpya māṃ nivartanteअप्राप्य मां निवर्तन्ते
- not reaching Me, return (aprāpya + mām + nivartante)
- mṛtyusaṃsāravartmaniमृत्युसंसारवर्त्मनि
- to the path of death and rebirth (mṛtyu-saṃsāra-vartmani)
Commentary
Site Commentary
Krishna doesn’t say the faithless are punished or condemned — the verb is nivartante, they “return,” the same word you’d use for someone circling back the way they came. Losing this path isn’t described as a penalty imposed from outside; it’s just what not-arriving looks like, which makes faith less a moral test to pass and more a condition for arrival that either holds or doesn’t.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- If a growth path isn't landing for you, resist reading that as punishment for some failing — sometimes the absence of belief in the process is mechanically the same as not yet arriving, which is a starting condition to address, not a verdict on your worth.
Professional
- When a new process or tool doesn't take hold on a team, look first at whether skepticism is quietly routing people back to old habits before assuming the rollout itself failed — the same initiative can fail for belief reasons rather than design reasons.
Family & Social
- If someone you care about keeps drifting back to an old, unhelpful pattern, consider that they may simply not yet believe the new way will hold — that's different from stubbornness, and it calls for building trust in the practice rather than pressing harder on the behavior.
Ask yourself
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